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2015-07-16

Vacation (1983)

Vacation
(Harold Ramis, 1983)

The Griswold family's cross-country drive to the Walley World
theme park proves to be much more arduous than they ever anticipated.

For almost
twenty years I’ve been watching year after year Christmas Vacation and saying to whomever that cares to listen that
it is my favorite Christmas movie. But I have never seen the other movies of
the franchise and even the original Vacation
film that will have some kind of a remake this summer. Since this summer my
wife and my daughter will embark on a car trip, not to Walley World but to
Wildwood New Jersey, I had the urge to finally watch Vacation and see what it was all about.

Back in 1983,
it had a huge box-office success and quickly became a cult classic. Still to
this day I can’t figure why I haven’t seen this film on TV before. Clark
Griswold (Chevy Chase) and his wife
Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) along their
two kids Rusty (Anthony Michael Hall)
and Audrey (Dana Barron) will go on
a trip from Chicago to Los Angeles to the famous Walley World park, a ripoff of
Disney Land.

Many moments
of the John Hughes story are
repeated in his Christmas Vacation
and makes them like trademark jokes of the franchise. The infamous visit to
cousin Eddie and Catherine will become stellar moments just like the pool scene
with the girl in the red Ferrari.

The couple of
Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo works well because Clark wants to be a good
father, a good husband but he is so lefty and wants everything to be so damn
perfect that everything is screwed up and she embarks on his mad ideas with a
certain disdain but she loves her goofer husband so much that it reminds us of
all of our dads and how we are as dads too.

The real
genius behind the Vacation franchise
is John Hughes and his writing makes it the best imperfect family. It reminds
us how the road is half the fun and how the ups and downs makes it for great
family memories. Sure it is reflecting a very late 1950’s idealized America but
nostalgia and memories are hard to split at some point.

Overall, Vacation is a fun ride with the Griswold
family and may or may not have influenced another well known American family :
The Simpsons. I think that many
elements link those families together and I wish that the Vacation series would
be as everlasting as The Simpsons and
maybe keep a level of quality that the cartoon did not achieved past a certain
number of years.